AIRA
AIRA overview
What AIRA does, the three steps it runs, and the review-and-accept loop that governs all of them.
AIRA is the assistant that gets a project from a brief to a spatial programme. It does not draw the building. It works out what the building needs to contain, how much of it there is, and which parts want to be near which — and then hands that to you as something you can edit and draw over.
Open it from a project's header. If the project was created with a site and a brief, AIRA has everything it needs to start.
The three steps
AIRA runs exactly three generative steps, in a fixed order. Each one takes the accepted output of the one before it as input, which is why the order cannot be skipped.
| Step | What it establishes | Needs first |
|---|---|---|
| Project Context | Everything the design must respect — site, buildable envelope, environment, risks, and the drivers they imply. | A site |
| Departments | Programme blocks and per-department area allocation. | Project Context, accepted |
| Adjacency | Direct, indirect and restricted relationships between departments. | Departments, accepted |
The run ends on the Boards wall. Boards is a view of those three steps rather than a fourth step — nothing generates it, so it cannot be out of date with respect to the work it shows.
The envelope is computed, not invented
The maximum buildable envelope — the setback ring, FAR × site area, height ÷ floor-to-floor — is *derived* from the Project Context figures, not produced by a language model. If you correct a setback or an FAR, the envelope follows deterministically.
The review loop
Nothing AIRA produces takes effect until you accept it. Every step goes through the same loop:
Run
AIRA generates a proposal from the accepted upstream work.
Review
The proposal appears with a Review chip. Sometimes there are several options; the one AIRA recommends is marked, but never pre-selected for you.
Edit
Change any value directly — areas, room counts, relationships. Your edits are recorded as overrides on top of what was generated, so it stays clear what came from where.
Accept
The proposal becomes the committed truth for that step, gets an Accepted chip, and unlocks the next step.
Status vocabulary
- Review
- A proposal is on the table and waiting for your decision.
- Accepted
- You committed this. It is the version downstream steps read.
- Stale
- Something upstream changed after this was accepted, so what you see may no longer follow from it. Re-run the step, or accept that it is deliberately out of step.
Accepted work survives a re-run
Re-running a step that already has an accepted version does not throw the accepted one away. The board keeps showing the committed payload — the truth on record — and marks the new proposal separately. You choose which becomes the record.
What it costs
Each generative run consumes AI tokens from your workspace's monthly allowance. Editing, reviewing, accepting and re-reading cost nothing — only generation does. See AI tokens.